Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

The PIL project has been rather inactive lately (last release in 2009), and one big issue is the missing python 3 compatibility. There seems to be some general agreement that Pillow [1] is a likely candidate to succeed PIL, and in particular to bring python 3 support, see the discussion at [2]. Pillow describes itself as

Pillow is the "friendly" PIL fork. PIL is the Python Imaging Library. Pillow was
started for and is currently maintained by the Plone community. But it is used by
many other folks in the Python web community, and probably elsewhere too.
The fork author's goal is to foster packaging improvements via:
- Publicized development and solicitation of community support.
- Exploration of packaging problems within the fork, most noticably
via adding setuptools support but also via clean up & refactoring
of packaging code.

Pillow is practically a drop-in replacement for PIL, except one small issue (see below).

For Python 3, there is a fork which offers Py3 compatibility here [3]. The patches are planed for review and merge into Pillow, see [4].

Pillow is a drop-in replacement for PIL, with one detail: The PIL modules now use relative imports between each other, so it is no longer possible to write

import Image

but one needs to write

from PIL import Image

The former variant was only made possible by a PIL.pth file in %{python_sitearch}, and actually looks like a hack for backwards compatibility. (100% compatibility between PIL and Pillow could still be achieved by patching away the relative imports in the python2 variant.)

The python-pillow package will Obsolete and Provide python-imaging so there's no need for dependent packages to change their Requires line at this time.